After reading the USP and elevator pitch for Ack, someone took the time to review the hype and make his own opinion about ack. It appears to him that although Ack is not a drop-in replacement for Grep, the DWIM factor makes it a very interesting alternative for many situations where interactive use by a human is involved.

So I decided to give it a spin. ‘apt-cache search ack’ matched 15971 packages related to crack, backup, pack, slack and whatever else you can imagine, but an ‘apt-cache search ack | grep -E ^ack’ solved that problem at once.

In Debian, there was already a kanji code converter named “ack” – but since we don’t intend as far as I know to write Kanji anytime soon I tought it was reasonable to alias ack=’ack-grep’ so that our shell takes advantage of the short name.

After toying with it a little, it appears that Ack is indeed a handy tool which I’ll be definitely using in the future. There is a performance tradeoff when operating with the C locale, but since we strive to be an all UTF-8 shop I don’t care much about that. And anyway, in most interactive situations, brain usage and fingers motricity are far more precious ressources than run time or CPU time…